When does reputation lie? Dynamic feedbacks between costly signals, social capital and social prominence

Performing a dramatic act of religious devotion, creating an art exhibit, or releasing a new product are all examples of public acts that signal quality and contribute to building a reputation. Signalling theory predicts that these public displays can reliably reveal quality. However, data from ethnographic work in South India suggests that more prominent individuals gain more from reputation-building religious acts than more marginalized individuals. To understand this phenomenon, we extend signalling theory to include variation in people’s social prominence or social capital, first with an analytical model and then with an agent-based model. We consider two ways in which social prominence/capital may alter signalling: (i) it impacts observers’ priors, and (ii) it alters the signallers’ pay-offs. These two mechanisms can result in both a ‘reputational shield,’ where low quality individuals are able to ‘pass’ as high quality thanks to their greater social prominence/capital, and a ‘reputational poverty trap,’ where high quality individuals are unable to improve their standing owing to a lack of social prominence/capital. These findings bridge the signalling theory tradition prominent in behavioural ecology, anthropology and economics with the work on status hierarchies in sociology, and shed light on the complex ways in which individuals make inferences about others. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling’.

Signs of Reincarnation: Exploring Beliefs, Cases, and Theory by James Matlock

James Matlock’s Signs of Reincarnation discusses important issues related to the belief in reincarnation. These include the historical and social prominence of this belief in various cultures around the world, especially its place in spiritual and religious communities. Matlock also explores data seemly suggestive of reincarnation and attempts to develop a theory of reincarnation that can account for the data collected by parapsychological investigators and researchers. In this way, Matlock aims to show that belief in reincarnation is defensible as a conclusion drawn from what he calls “signs” of reincarnation. Matlock does a good job mapping out the wide range of beliefs about reincarnation across time and culture. His description of various case studies and their salient features is highly informative. And his effort to develop a theory of reincarnation—what he calls a “processual soul theory”—is a laudable attempt at trying to accommodate the various details of interesting case studies and a core idea of reincarnation in the spiritual traditions of the world. Unfortunately, this is where my praise ends. Like many other books on the topic, Matlock’s book suffers from a variety of serious defects. The cavalcade of poor scholarship, conceptual confusion, and impoverished argumentation is particularly egregious given that Signs is allegedly based on the lecture notes for Matlock’s course on reincarnation pitched at the advanced undergraduate or Masters-level graduate seminar. In what follows, I’ll explain why Matlock’s book is paradigmatic of nearly everything that’s wrong with survival research over the past thirty years.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of a serora, or a devout laywoman entrusted with caring for a parish church or shrine in the early modern Basque Country and Navarre. As common as seroras were in early modern northern Iberia, their prominence and geographic reach was limited to monolingual Basque-speaking lands and their bilingual neighboring areas. They of course shared many things in common with other devout and semireligious women active in the late medieval and early modern periods; however, the seroras represent a powerful variation that accorded Basque women far more social prominence, economic independence, and religious status and responsibility than any of their counterparts. The vocation was always reserved solely for women and was considered functionally separate from any role the lower male clergy might assume. In this capacity, the seroras may be one of the earliest examples of a specifically female livelihood with a salary that did not imitate or replicate male labor and that took place outside the home. Seroras complemented, and certainly facilitated, male religious work, but the two operated in tandem and were not considered interchangeable. In this light, the seroras push one to reconsider assumptions that early modern Catholic reform was categorically repressive and restrictive for women.

The Years of Economic Prosperity

This chapter examines the prosperity of the Atlantic port cities across the eighteenth century—their so-called ‘golden age’—and the rise to prominence of great merchant houses and trading firms, with a discussion of the degree to which they became dependent on Atlantic shipping for their profits. It shows how merchant families rose to positions of social prominence and distinction, and shows how nobles, too, from Brittany and the Atlantic region came to invest in colonial shipping. But the century was not a period of unbroken prosperity. War frequently intervened, leading to the disruption of the shipping lanes and the loss or capture of French vessels by enemy ships. It also drove many French merchants to privateering, which was a customary and longstanding response in times of war.

Second Study

The second chapter takes off from the first in using the affect of humiliation. Humiliation has already been discussed widely in scholarship with relation to caste—see for example Humiliation: Claims and Context (OUP, 2011). This chapter discusses one of the most influential Dalit memoirs—Urmila Pawar’s Aaydan: The Weave of My Life, A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs (2008). Pawar’s powerful work recounts her life from a rural childhood, through education, marriage, and social prominence in the Dalit movement. The book thus demonstrates the evolving subjectivity of the protagonist as she outgrows intense negative affect (such as caste humiliation) to emerge as a full-fledged and respected writer and activist.

Introduction

The Introduction provides the necessary scholarly and historical context for the five main chapters. Generally speaking, religiously conservative Irish Presbyterians have not received the attention that their numbers and social prominence warrant. This puts Irish history at odds with wider trends. The analysis offered in this book draws upon the upsurge of scholarly interest in evangelical Protestantism to recover the theological thought of conservative Presbyterians. It shows that conservatism did not have to involve a dismissal of the modern and a retreat into anti-intellectualism and fundamentalism. It proceeds on the basis that scholars ought to take seriously the self-confessed religious motivations of believers rather than immediately jumping to explain them away by reference to other factors considered to be of more significance. Presbyterian writers had logical reasons for being conservative that owed much to their Irish experience but to which their conservatism cannot be entirely reduced.

Sedation-Facilitated Sexual Violence

A recent investigative report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution exposed what appears to be widespread sexual abuse committed by medical professionals. The report suggests that the intellectual advantages and social prominence of well-heeled medical professionals provide them with special resources to commit an undetected series of offenses and to avoid or reduce punishment when they are ultimately apprehended. Thus, the story implies that medical sexual abuse and its control is shaped by power and influence. Similarly, social constructionists argue that class and power shape debates, in part, through the manner in which the media frames social problems. The current study seeks to explore these issues by employing a qualitative approach to analyzing news reporting on medical professionals who drug and sexually violate their patients. Drawing from 22 sedation-facilitated sexual violence (SFSV) stories, we compare the media accounts of SFSV to 22 media treatments of stranger street attacks (i.e., blitz rapes). Guided by constructionist frameworks, for example, we investigated whether or not the language used to describe medical offenders suggested that they were more or less condemnation worthy than “stranger” offenders who attacked their victims in public spaces. Compared to blitz rapists, medical offenders were more likely to be referred to using admiration worthy terms (e.g., intelligent, exemplary), and their victims were more likely to be described as helpless and lacking in agency. Blitz rapists are more often described as coercive and brutal, and their victims are more likely to be framed as heroic, especially when they resist the offender.

Religion and the Samanid Amirs

To situate Naṣīḥat al-mulūk in the religious culture of the tenth-century Samanid domains, this chapters explores the orientations and practices of the Samanid amirs from the later ninth century onwards. It portrays the proclivities towards austerity (zuhd) and religious devotion (ʿibāda) of the earlier amirs, especially the generation of Naṣr I and his brothers, the memory of whose conduct significantly shaped Pseudo-Māwardī’s conception of good governance. The chapter presents the efforts of this generation of amirs to develop mutually supportive relations with the religious scholars, and their active participation in the public religious sphere, in, for example, the hearing and transmission of ḥadīth and participation in the funerary rites of prominent scholars. It treats the social prominence and economic means of religious scholars and renunciants, whose support and co-operation Pseudo-Māwardī urges the king to cultivate. The chapter concludes with a discussion of religious developments during the reign of Naṣr II.